Hopefully we wouldn't have to. We'd quickly close them as FAQ duplicates though, and I'm sure we might be free to make such comments. :)

As it stands, nobody has a basis to as it's totally out of the way. But if the site made an effort to get people to read the FAQ's (a real effort, not what it has now) and they still did, I wouldn't feel to bad saying "dummy".

@Mads: They are pre-searched questions, displayed *on the ask a question page* with a nice "Please check if your question is in the FAQ." If the search worked perfectly right now, you'd have an argument. But it doesn't.

There are an infinite number of ways to end up with a resource management problem, yet even Google (and indeed, the best textual search) will fail to ever link the two together, because communication is more than words. Search engines don't yet search meaning.

@Mads: Ah, but it will. By having a FAQ people can read, are linked to, and with generic question titles, many people will be inclined to read it or even directly see their problem is about resources and managing them.

At the least, it gives us a consistent place to refer to all things resource management, so people get closed-as-duplicate to consistent, reliable, and thought-out information.

I think a FAQ is useful less to keep beginners from asking the frequently-asked questions, but to give a convenient place for the more experienced users to find a good question/answer to refer them to. Right now, I run into: 1) poor search capability, 2) good answers to lousy questions, 3) good questions with a few good, but lots of bad answers, 4) etc. Enough to make it difficult to refer to a good "stock" answer even for questions that really do have one.

@Bocochoco That's a bit extreme. Maybe if the "related questions" search was perfect. And perfect would need to include knowing when there are no related questions. For example, that would only piss me off when asking something like this, which has no related answers.

C++ is a technical language, that's "becoming too expert-friendly." Embracing that, we'd like to take expert knowledge and make it easy to refer to, so beginners can get over the hurdle.

@GMan: I still disagree with you, but I think I will leave it at that. I think people who already have a clue already use Google search and SO search, and search multiple times with different keywords. I believe the target group for the FAQ (the newbies) will blissfully ignore it, just like they never use search.

@GMan: They wouldn't look at the FAQ even if you threatened them on their life. Starting a new question and waiting two minutes for the fastest-gun-in-the-west posts is just so much more convenient.

@MadsElvheim: the discussions was largely triggered by the departure of Neil Butterworth, and I think that does point toward a real problem -- some very knowledgeable users depart due to the amount of noise. The same problem has all but killed quite a few newsgroups (aka. "Eternal September").

Well, I'd rather see site support for making a community-made FAQ per-tag, and having the C++ community help make in-depth question & answers to add to the FAQ so we have a central source of information, then do nothing.

I think a good example is the opengl tag. Why do people even bother asking opengl-related questions when they struggle with the programming language they use, or don't have the required math background? I'd say that half of all the questions with the tag are not related to opengl, or trivial in nature, given one knows a tiny amount of computer graphics.

I still answer their questions anyway, because it's too late to increase the requirements for entry now. That was decided from the start. StackOverflow is for the masses, not for people who have a clue.

@MadsElvheim The problem isn't with people that don't know what they are doing; the problem is with people that don't want to know what they are doing. It's the people that ask hundreds of questions without taking the time to understand things and learn things on their own that are a problem.

@JamesMcNellis: a nice program of C#? Thanks, but I'd about as soon have a nice impacted wisdom tooth. IMO, Java combined the worst parts of C (the syntax) with most of the bad parts of Smalltalk, then C# combined corporate greed with the worst mistakes of Java. I can't think of anything "nice" about the result.

@James @Mads Which brings up this fundamental divide in goal answerers have on SO. litb brought it up a little bit ago. It's: do we want to just solve the problem, or empower the asker to solve the problem?

@JamesMcNellis: Sure, and those people won't change, even if you politely show them how to improve. You can include them and cope with them (status quo), or you can require a minimum entry level and shut them out (like a closed forum).

@GMan i think with tools like stackoverflow where you can get any question answered every time you come across a huddle, some people are less likely yo learn and just keep asking questions instead of taking time to learn the techniques

@Mads: That's a bad approach to life in general. Don't want to get life-coachy, but that's an often fallacious way to think. I was an asshole when I was 16 because I was smart, and thought in black-and-white. And I was almost always wrong and closed-minded. Luckily I happened to meet a professor of philosophy who took me under his wing so-to-speak and basically saved my rationality. I'd hope we can look past black and white thinking.

People change all the time. It's still better to do what you can and help those who will change then say "most won't change, why bother?".

@Nic: Right. If SO had a paradigm shift towards empowerment over patching, I think we'd not only end up helping out more, but the community in general would become more knowledgeable and people would get the real information they need in a faster and more fruitful manner.

@GMan: But I do help people, and I'm always polite. That doesn't mean I believe it makes a difference on the bigger scale. I simply follow the StackOverflow rules. My view isn't rooted in humanity, but rather the rules StackOverflow set for itself.

@GMan: Sure you can make StackOverflow better with less trivial questions and with a more knowledgeable user base. But I don't think you could call it StackOverflow afterwards. I just don't think it's as easy as adding a FAQ. Maybe if you banned distruptive users who asked too many obvious/duplicate questions, or made sure that all users participating in a tag met a minimum knowledge level. Or if membership required being associated with a university or company. Or a minimum age. Or whatever.

A way to assert prerequisite knowledge, or discard an unwanted demographic.

A lot of the time, it's hard to blame the person asking the frequently asked question, too. People ask what the result of i = i++ + ++i is because they are confused and don't get the result they expect. It's really not possible to search for something like that without knowing that it's undefined behavior (it manifests itself in so many different ways; what would you search for?), and once you know that it's undefined, you have the answer to the question.

To a certain degree, that sort of question should be expected frequently because C++ is in many areas extremely complex.

@James: Indeed. Hopefully an eye-catching FAQ title would solve that in some cases like my suggested one. But then we go back to, at the least, having a central place to refer people to for that particular class of problem.

Upfront: I know this is off-topic here, belongs to meta, and should be closed and moved to meta. I post it here nevertheless, so it will get seen by more people who watch the C++ tag. Feel free to move this to meta (I've even tried to already add the discussion tag, although I'm not sure it will ...

The G-Man, voiced by Michael Shapiro, is a mysterious recurring character in the Half-Life series of first-person shooter video games. He is known to display peculiar behavior and capabilities beyond that of a normal human, and his identity and motives remain almost completely unexplained. He plays the role of an overseer and employer, both observing the player as the games progress and pulling strings to control the outcome of specific events throughout the Half-Life saga. He claims to answer to some unseen higher authority which he refers to as simply his 'employers'. The G-Man's con...

@Mads: I was just thinking about that. It could even be made to switch the casting method.

But I think that's taking it too far. If it's already strange enough using static_cast, auto_reinterpret_cast would be awful. And if their aren't other types of auto_cast's, auto_static_cast just seems verbose for no reason.